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That is not correct. You cannot play against a team from different league of the same division. To win a division you have to beat only few teams succesfully and you have whole season run to do it. Cup is about relegation battle.

At this condition is cup in fact pointless, because doesnt offer any chance to win even for a 2nd division teams (if any won the cup, Im sure that 3rd division team didnt). The problem is that you have here only frame of teams in the first two leagues. Majority is much lower and from that point of view it is not interresting, because you will always know, that you will relegate sooner or later no matter what you do.

Im not sure about basketball, but in football there are cups divided among different levels, so 1st league team will not usually go play agaisnt bunch of villagers to the arena where buy tickets mostly families of the players.

I dont know how about you, but I dont see any motivation in a long run in the cup, because you have to have extra players for it which doesnt have to cross over 50k wage, because it doesnt make big difference anyway if you are losing money because of it.

my mistake i misread your post.
still i think the cup is fine how it is.

What if the cup games were just between the same league, so all of div 3 in one cup etc. And the winner got something more rewarding so that it would make things more interesting. For example, the winner of the cup could receive automatic promotion to the higher division and 1 million dollar prize money. This would mean that teams could try and promote via the cup or via their league, or via both if they are good enough. Would add some more tactics to the game as well.

I dont believe that playing against teams from higher leagues is so interesting, because the difference between these teams are usually strongly remarkable.

If there really is a need to leave the cup as the way it is (hattrick way), the behaviour of the teams during the cup should be different. There has to be any possibility to boost motivation or something (by beating slightly better team in country rank), so in the end of the lucky road you can beat 1st league team with 10k players like they were 50k players. That would be interesting.

Here is my idea. In the first 2 rounds only the lowest division teams play, then the remaining teams are matched up against teams from the division above, and so on...

So for a 4 division country it would look like this:

Round 1: The 1024 D4 teams face off (512 teams progress)
Round 2: The 512 D4 teams face off (256 teams progress))
Round 3: The 256 D4 teams face off against the 256 D3 teams (256 teams progress)
Round 4: The winners face off (128 teams progress)
Round 5: The winners face off (64 teams progress)
Round 6: The remaining 64 D4 and D3 teams face off against the 64 D2 teams (64 teams progress)
Round 7: The winners face off (32 teams progress)
Round 8: The winners face off (16 teams progress)
Round 9: The remaining 16 D4, D3, and D2 teams face off against the 16 D1 teams (16 teams progress)
Round 10: The winners face off (8 teams progress)
Round 11: Quarterfinal (4 teams progress)
Round 12: Semifinal (2 teams progress)
Round 13: Final (1 winner)

This way the lower division teams would have an enthusiasm advantage against higher divisions. The D1 teams are automatically in the round of 32. I can't be bothered doing the math, but if a D4 team TIEd every league and cup game in this system and made it to round 9 then they would have a huge enthusiasm boost over a D1 team.

But it wouldn't work for countries with more than 4 divisions...

Last edited by Jeeves at 8/3/2010 8:58:53 AM

Wow ... that's complicated. If so, I prefer the unseeded national cup.

In the USA Cup, how many teams are entered into the Tournament?